The contracts may start trading in the first half, Carlos
Ratto, an executive director at Cetip, said in an interview
yesterday in Sao Paulo.

Cetip is expanding as commodities prices soar and exchanges
diversify to increase revenue. The UBS Bloomberg Constant
Maturity Commodity Index has almost doubled in the past two
years as metals, crude and agriculture prices gained. In
December, Cetip agreed to buy GRV Solutions SA, a provider of
credit-risk management services, for 2 billion reais ($1.2
billion). Investors are returning to derivatives after incurring
losses in 2008 when companies including meatpacker Sadia SA made
wrong-way currency bets, Ratto said.

“Despite the fact that the problem was not the product,
but the use of the product, it suffered a lot during the
crisis,” Ratto said of derivatives. “The trend is that this
aversion slowly reduces and the companies start using more
derivatives.”

Brazil’s derivatives trading expanded 10 percent in 2010 to
850 billion reais from a year earlier, Ratto said. This year,
volume is likely to rise by the same percentage, he said.

Cetip rose 55 percent in the last 12 months through
yesterday, compared with a 0.8 percent fall for Brazil’s
benchmark Bovespa stock index. The shares rose 1.8 percent to
23.69 reais in Sao Paulo trading at the market close.

Derivatives are contracts whose value is derived from
stocks, bonds, loans, currencies and commodities, or linked to
specific events such as changes in interest rates or the
weather.